Viral TikTok Star Brandon Dwyer Scores His First D1 Points for Florida Gulf Coast

It’s no exaggeration to say thousands upon thousands of points were scored this past Monday on the opening night of college basketball season.

One of the most attention-grabbing buckets came from a Florida Gulf Coast benchwarmer whose team was already beating its NAIA opponent by 30. Yes, seriously.

I’m not on TikTok and never intend to be, but Brandon Dwyer is a popular figure there. After walking onto the basketball team at La Salle, Dwyer followed coach Pat Chambers to Florida Gulf Coast in 2022. While making social media videos showing his new life in Florida, the Delaware native made a video captioned “Day in the life of a D1 player” — rather ironic, because he had barely played at all, but he’s a D1 athlete all the same.

It morphed into Dwyer’s audience growing and rooting for him to score one point in his collegiate career. And finally, at the start of his fifth season of eligibility, his “Road to 1 Point” journey ended Monday.

Chambers appreciates Dwyer and all he’s done for the Eagles as a practice player and energy guy at the end of the bench. So much so that the coach actually drew up a play for Dwyer to launch a three Monday against New College of Florida.

And this? At its core, this is what college sports is all about.

The crowd knew exactly what had happened when Dwyer made his otherwise inconsequential shot. They cheered like they just won the conference title. It’s a phenomenon you’ll find at other schools, too — a walk-on who hardly plays gets extra affection from his student section when he gets in. But this was on another level.

Dwyer finished the game with six points and later posed for a parody of the famous Wilt Chamberlain photo after his 100-point game, with Dwyer holding a plain piece of paper showing the number “6.” However you feel about social media stars, you gotta hand it to them — that’s incredible.

For some, Dwyer is reminiscent of media figure Mark Titus, a former Ohio State benchwarmer who coined the term “Club Trillion” because box scores often showed he would get into a game for one minute and produce a bunch of zeroes after that.

For me, I’m reminded more of a man named Donald De La Haye, who used to make YouTube videos chronicling his life as a backup kicker at UCF. But the NCAA would not allow him to keep his scholarship if he kept monetizing his football-related videos — you know, when profiting off your name, image and likeness as an athlete was verboten back in 2017.

De La Haye chose YouTube over football and became a millionaire from his endeavors. In other words, he chose to go pro in something other than football, to borrow a supposed NCAA slogan. All the NCAA’s rigid and nonsensical rules did was get in the way of letting him also enjoy the experience of Division I athletics.

So I hope Dwyer understands who came before him and laid the groundwork for him to become a TikTok influencer with more than 1.3 million followers. Less than 10 years ago, this all wouldn’t have been possible.

I’m interested to see what Dwyer does with his following when his final basketball season is over. There are copious ways he can use it for good, and I feel like he will. But he can always say he scored for a Division I basketball team.